BitPay executive chairman Tony Gallippi announced today that his company paid for its upcoming college football bowl game sponsorship in bitcoin.

The surprise news came at a press conference held by BitPay and the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce to promote the upcoming Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl.

There, Gallippi revealed that BitPay paid ESPN Events, a subsidiary of the popular US sports network ESPN, in bitcoin in order to secure the sponsorship, a company spokesperson confirmed with CoinDesk. Notably, Tampa Bay Business Journal

has estimated that its full contract with the broadcaster is estimated at roughly $1.5m over the course of three years.

Last week, in an opening salvo into the Bitcoin trading world, I suggested that you may want to look at a long position in Bitcoin against the U.S. Dollar to take advantage of the weakness in the previous weeks. That looked good initially as the expected jump came and would still be showing a profit, but the retracement over the last couple of days upheld what I said at the time, that this was a fairly long-term idea and as such required a belief in the fundamental value of the virtual currency.

I am not a Bitcoin evangelist, nor an expert, but then neither am I a hater. I simply have a trading background and therefore have an interest in a volatile market. The deeper I have looked into the phenomenon, however, the more convinced I have become that Bitcoin has a future and could have a lasting influence on the world of business and finance.

My writing on the subject has prompted several discussions with people who hold a range of views, but I have yet to find anybody who has given me what I consider a convincing argument as to why they believe it will fail. If you have such an argument, feel free to enlighten me in the comment section. Usually that view seems to be based on an inability, or sometimes an unwillingness, to understand what Bitcoin is and how it functions. Some have said that it is all an illusion based on perceived rather than real value, at which point I gently point out that the same is true of the pieces of green paper that they dedicate so much of their life to accumulating.

Would you like to pay for your morning coffee with your credit card or your bitcoin wallet?

If San Francisco-based start-up Shift Payments has its way, you'll soon be able to switch from real money to digital currency when paying with a single card.

The company is beta testing 100 cards with friends and family members. It allows users to make purchases with accounts from Coinbase-a bitcoin exchange-and Ripple-a digital payment exchange protocol that can support real and digital currency.

While the card does not currently access bank or credit accounts (just bitcoin accounts for now), co-founder Meg Nakamura says Shift Payments is trying to make that happen soon.

International payments platform GoCoin has announced a technology partnership with point-of-sales (POS) service provider Apriva.

Apriva's Gateway connects payment devices, merchant acquirers and payment processors to deploy and manage wireless payments. The new deal will allow it to process payments in multiple digital currencies including bitcoin, litecoin and dogecoin.

Stacey Finley Tappin, Apriva's senior vice president of sales and marketing communications for North America, told CoinDesk that the company strives to offer products and services to its more than 1,000 channels that allow them to differentiate themselves to their merchant base.

The company's reseller base won't have to risk market volatility under the scheme - GoCoin will allow merchants to either keep the coins or trade them for fiat currency at the current market rate.